Michael A. Shepperd, artistic director of Celebration Theatre, has been terminated following an internal investigation of allegations that he groped and propositioned an actor backstage during the company's 2019 production of The Producers. Shepperd, describing Celebration Theatre as "a queer safe space" where flirting and physical affection were common, maintains that any and all contact between him and his...
For its first post-pandemic performances this fall, Lyric Opera of Chicago — based, it seems, on feedback from potential audience members and official guidelines last year — decided to keep all performances under two-and-a-half hours and eliminate intermission. When he reported this, writes Chris Jones, "my mailbox immediately filled up with one burning question from Chicago's opera fans: When...
Representing Trump during his first impeachment trial, Dershowitz ended his answer to a question from Sen. Ted Cruz by saying, "Every public official that I know believes that his election is in the public interest, … and if a president does something which he believes will help him get elected in the public interest, that cannot be the kind...
Here is the story — told, it must be said, rather against the wishes of its founder, who'd have preferred privacy — of the Alphadyne Foundation. - The New York Times
"Before Halprin, American dance was cast in Graham's regal mold, presented formally onstage, and performed by highly trained bodies that acted out the choreographer's vision in a rarefied movement language. Halprin's rebellion was to declare that any movement, performed with presence and intention, could be a dance, and anybody could be a dancer." - San Francisco Chronicle
"The French president Emmanuel Macron has nominated Laurence des Cars, currently the president of the Musée d'Orsay, to helm the Louvre in a major shake-up at the world-famous Paris institution. … Des Cars will head across the Seine river to replace its current president Jean-Luc Martinez, who was unsuccessful in his campaign for a third term." - Artnet
"Choirs had been working under the assumption that restrictions on rehearsals would be relaxed on 17 May, at the same time as shops, bars and hairdressers opened up. Instead, the guidelines" — revised the following day to limit indoor rehearsals to six people and those outdoors to 30 — "were actually more draconian than the ones in place last...
On Monday, the Biden administration sent letters to architect Steven Spandle, landscape architect Perry Guillot, sculptor Chas Fagan and commission chairman Justin Shubow asking that they resign by 6 p.m. that day or face termination. None of the four resigned. - Washington Post
The paths they each followed are telling. If you are even marginally involved in the theater, it is impossible not to envy the state support of the arts that benefited Stoppard in Britain or be angry at how, like most American directors, Nichols spent so much time chasing the dollar. Their biographers, too, take differing approaches to these lives....
There is no doubting the clarity and vigor of his prose, but when it comes to assessing his capacity to face up to grim truths, there is good reason to doubt Orwell’s claims to his having looked reality unflinchingly in the eye and told it like it was. Orwell’s friend Malcolm Muggeridge believed that while Orwell displayed “an almost...
This model of financial support has not only allowed the DIA to weather the storm of the past year, but has also given the museum the ability to reinvest in our endowment. Through robust fundraising, strong returns, and by not needing to draw from the operating endowment, it has more than doubled in the past five years, from $124...
This often irreversible decay of Web content is commonly known as linkrot. It is similar to the related problem of content drift, or the typically unannounced changes––retractions, additions, replacement––to the content at a particular URL. - Columbia Journalism Review
"When asked to describe the energy at this month's Youth America Grand Prix Finals, judge Sascha Radetsky had one word: 'Stratospheric.' More than 800 dancers from around the United States … competed onstage at the Straz Center for the Performing Arts in Tampa … from May 9 to 16. And after months of cramped kitchen-counter barres and delayed Zoom...
